Consumer Reports: Peconic Bay 3rd safest hospital in New York

TIM GANNON PHOTO | Hospital staffers and other officials pose Thursday with a new sign, which states the hospital falls under the PBMC Health umbrella group.

Peconic Bay Medical Center may want to get a lot of copies of the current issue of Consumer Reports for its waiting rooms.

The Riverhead hospital was ranked third in all of New York State in hospital safety in the August edition of Consumer Reports, which is in stores now.

“This is somewhat remarkable, but not unexpected,” said hospital president and CEO Andrew Mitchell. “We take patient safety very seriously.”

He said the hospital’s success is not based on any one part of the hospital, but on the way all areas work together.

Back in March, Peconic Bay ranked second among New York Metropolitan area hospitals in a Consumer Reports story that only ran online.

This one ranks hospitals in 10 Northeast states and is in the actual print edition of the magazine.

The magazine ranked 1,159 hospitals nationwide, but broke up the publication into four regional print editions. Only about 18 percent of the hospitals nationwide were rated, because many don’t have properly recorded data, the magazine states.

Hospitals were scored on a 1 to 100 basis, with 100 being the highest grade.

They were graded in six categories: infections, readmissions, communication, scanning, complications, and mortality.

Peconic Bay’s overall score was 59, ranking just behind Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, which scored 61, and Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, which scored 60, among New York State hospitals.

The top hospital in the nation was Billings Clinic in Montana, which scored a 71. Some well known hospitals scored low, such as UCLA Medical Center (43), the Cleveland Clinic (39) and Mount Sinai Medical Center (30), the report states.

Peconic Bay scored well in infections and scanning, though its low grades in communications brought it down, according to the report.

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